I don’t know if ChoicePoint or any of its subsidiaries are actually involved in the development or deployment of the new passports for the United States, but given the track record of DHS and of these companies, I would rather stick with more basic, less technologically advanced security methods for now.

A great point that has been lost in a lot of the reporting. Just how useful is the service they provide when they were spoofed over 50 times by fraudulent users?

These companies always beg the question of which entities are authorized to be their customers to “legitimately” obtain this kind of sensitive data about people? What would stop me from paying to get the data on anyone they had? What criteria would they establish to prevent just anyone from getting at this data? Or, do they not care as long as you have the cash?

Just for fun, if a rough accounting of the report I received is done by giving each correct entry a point, deducting a point for each error and ignoring omissions then my ChoicePoint report was only 56% accurate.

No link, but in the Wall Street Journal Monday June 13, there’s a story on Wal Mart “rescinding” its retirement package for ex-executive Thomas Coughlin. Coughlin’s package was worth about $12m. Coughlin has not resigned from the board of…Choicepoint.

I’ve been getting a lot of attention from ladies online recently. I’ve been talking to one for about a week who lives in Gwinnett. The only problem is she works for Choicepoint (for those of you who don’t know, that’s the company that got in trouble for selling lots of people’s personal information to people posing as government entities or something), and although she’s not ugly, she doesn’t attract me too much.

To close, in stark contrast to the outporing of hate for Choicepoint, we offer up Two Minutes Hate from Choicepoint employee Jason Fayling, blogging at “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Jason offers up “Linux Sucks:”

I have been playing around with Linux lately. Specifically Red Hat FedoraCore 3. Let me tell you, for those who fear Linux will over come Windows. Fear Not! Linux Sucks! I spent my entire weekend last week trying to install that piece of junk. I finally got it to install after my 7th attempt, but even still, my sound card doesnt work. Granted, I am trying to run Linux inside Microsoft Virtual PC 2004, a virtual machine software, but that is because I am not willing to do a dual boot from my laptop. I had to get a hacked Linux kernel to get it to run within the virtual machine. What amazes me is how anybody gets anything done in Linux at all. There are so many CRYPTIC commands. For example, if you want to rename a file in Linux you use the mv command. What the heck is that all about?

2 thoughts on “Choicepoint, Two Minutes Hate”

Come on, Adam; this firestorm of ChoicePoint negativity is disrupting my settling down to some cocoa and peacefully reading Richard Baich’s “Winning as a CISO”… I’m just up to the part where he talks about the right way to handle a security incident.